The best way to do this is to take advantage of the containerized approach that will spin off a container with all the prerequisites packages to build the VIC executables so that you don’t have to install them, plus this won’t modify your system at all so a pretty clean way to take.

Like this:

So you have been playing with containers for a while now using Docker but once you start having several containers running in many VMs you find it difficult to manage or even remember which container runs on which VM.

VMware answer to this problem is called vSphere Integrated Containers (or VIC).

With VIC your Docker Hosts (the VMs that are running the containers) will not be a blackbox anymore but they will be capable of showing up like VMs in your vCenter server, exposing every property a VM holds.

Since I’m using selft signed certificates in my lab I had to work around some certificates checking problems:–tls-noverify: Disables client side certificates for authentication–force: Disables check for the destination vCenter, otherwise you would need the certificate thumbprint

You might get an error similar to “Error response from daemon: client is newer than server (client API version: 1.24, server API version: 1.23)”, this is because the docker client installed in PhotonOS can be newer than the Docker API endpoint.

Like this:

When Neil asked me a piece of advice on the subject I was just having conversations with customers on how will our world change in the near future.

A lot of these conversations are based on the introduction of conteinerized applications and this is what I am going to write as soon as I have enough time, hopefully soon enough.

Anyway Neil did a tremendous job in collecting opinions from experienced field engineers and IT experts so if you want to read what I answered him and what many others had to say go check his blog: http://www.flackbox.com/best-it-career-advice/

I think we should thank Neil for this huge source of information that is useful for everybody, not only newcomers in the IT field.

Like this:

After quite a bit of radio silence I’m going to write about Cloud Native Applications and VMware approach to those.
After spending some time looking into container technologies with open source software it’s nice to see that VMware is jumping on the boat by adding their enterprise vision which is probably the missing part compared to other solutions.
I will start by preparing a template for all the services that I will install and I will do it the VMware way by using PhotonOS which I intend to use as proof of concept for vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC), Photon Controller, Harbor and Admiral.
PhotonOS is a lightweight operating system written just for running containerized applications and such; I have to say that after getting familiar with it I quite like its simplicity and quick approach to all day to day activities.
First thing first, you have to choose your deployment type, there are a few:

I won’t describe the process as it’s pretty straightforward, I’ll just say that I manually installed PhotonOS with the ISO choosing the Minimal install option.

After installing we need the IP address and we also need to enable root to ssh into the box:

Like this:

Recently I had to record a night activity of a specific VM running on a specific host for troubleshooting reasons because vCenter data wasn’t just enough for that.

Using a number of blog posts around from Duncan Epping and others (it was many, I don’t even have the links anymore) I’ve put up my personal guide about how to take over this task because every time it’s like I have to start from scratch so I decided to document it.

First thing I created a script with the specific run time and collection data I needed:

Now your script will get executed and you’ll find a file with your data, but how to read it?
It’s dead simple, just open PerfMon on Windows, clear all running counters then right-click on “Performance Monitor” and in the tab “Sources” add your CSV file (need to unpack it first); in the data tab you will then be able to choose metrics and VMs you want to add to your graph.

It would be nice to have a tool that does the same on Mac but I couldn’t find one and I had to use a Windows VM; if you know a Mac alternative for PerfMon please add a comment.

Like this:

Now that we are moving away from SQL Express in favor of vPostgres for vCenter simple install on Windows and since vPostgres is the default database engine for (not so simple) install of vCSA I thought it would be nice to learn how to backup and restore this database.

Since it’s easier to perform these tasks on Windows and since there are already many guides on the Internet I will focus on vCSA because I think that more and more production environment (small and big) will be using vCSA since now it’s just as functional as vCenter if not more. (more on this in another post…)

You will find all instructions for both Windows and vCSA versions of vCenter on KB2091961, but more important than that you will find there also the python scripts that will work all the magic for you so grab the “linux_backup_restore.zip” file and copy it to the vCSA:

scp linux_backup_restore.zip root@<vcenter>:/tmp

For the copy to work you must have previously changed the shell configuration for the root user in “/etc/passwd” from “/bin/appliancesh” to “/bin/bash”

I logged back in the WebClient and my folder was back, so mission accomplished.

Now how do I schedule this thing? Using the good old crontab but before that I will write a script that will run the backup and also give a name to the backup file corresponding to the weekday so I can have a rotation of 7 days: